SOUTHEAST ASIA’S UNEVEN INFORMATION LANDSCAPE

Continuing Constraints
The situation in what are best described as the "semi-democracies" of Southeast Asia is more complex. In Singapore and Malaysia, social compacts cobbled together during three decades of prosperity and relative political stability have created affluent societies where citizens have traded their freedoms for comfort and social harmony. Both countries host the region's most advanced economies and are more integrated into the global economy than their neighbors.

Until the Asian crisis, the leaders of these countries were trumpeting their achievements - sustained high growth and significant strides in education and health care, among others - and proclaiming the success of a new "Asian" model of development that combined paternalistic authoritarianism with Western-style market economies. In their heyday in the 1990s, Singapore's senior leader Lee Kwan Yew and Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad argued that the curtailment of press and individual freedoms was a small price to pay for such success.

Especially in Singapore, a culture of conformity and obedience to authority is deeply ingrained. Thanks to 30 years of uninterrupted rule by the People's Action Party, Singaporeans now enjoy the highest per capita income in Southeast Asia on a par with that of Britain, but they also live under a regime of controls that would not be tolerated most anywhere else.

Onerous laws, some dating back to the British colonial era, impose harsh penalties on the publication or airing of anything that may be construed as inciting to hatred, disaffection or violence against the government. Newspapers and broadcast stations are at the mercy of government, which can withhold the issuance of annual licenses that allow them to operate. In both countries, an Official Secrets Act screens off from public view an entire range of public documents that are routinely available elsewhere.

This scaffolding of laws is buttressed by a structure of media ownership that is monopolized by the ruling party, in the case of Singapore, or by the different parties that make up the ruling coalition in Malaysia. This stranglehold was unbroken for decades and is only now being challenged by the Internet, which has offered citizens reports on and perspectives of their country and the world previously unavailable to them. Although there have been attempts in both countries to limit access to certain websites, their leaders realize that they risk being left out of the global knowledge economy and losing their competitive edge if they clamp down on the Internet.

The push factors for openness in these two countries are economic rather than political. Increasing integration into the global economy and the need to compete globally have been the primary forces for the transparency reforms that have taken place there since the late 1990s. But, as Australian scholar Garry Rodan noted, "these reforms are limited to selective changes in fiscal and corporate disclosures and data of an empirical nature that are of immediate market impact." These include banking disclosures, macroeconomic statistics and more extensive corporate data, except on state-owned enterprises which enjoy special privileges in both countries.

The release of such information helps make Singapore and Malaysia more attractive to global business. As the survey shows, Malaysia and to some extent, Singapore, are at the same level of openness as the Philippines and Thailand when it comes to corporate and business data. The following table indicates how much of the corporate and business records included in the survey are available in the eight countries covered by this study. These records include financial statements, company registration, corporate tax records, among other data.

Outside the realm of market imperatives, however, the situation is reversed, as Table 6 shows. When it comes to data on public officials, such as financial disclosures of those in government, Singapore and Malaysia end up at the bottom, together with Burma and Vietnam. It is obvious that despite some opening up in the economic sphere, the political sphere remains under tight control.

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